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A large-scale study of web password habits

Published: 08 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We report the results of a large scale study of password use andpassword re-use habits. The study involved half a million users over athree month period. A client component on users' machines recorded a variety of password strength, usage and frequency metrics. This allows us to measure or estimate such quantities as the average number of passwords and average number of accounts each user has, how many passwords she types per day, how often passwords are shared among sites, and how often they are forgotten. We get extremely detailed data on password strength, the types and lengths of passwords chosen, and how they vary by site. The data is the first large scale study of its kind, and yields numerous other insights into the role the passwords play in users' online experience.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
    May 2007
    1382 pages
    ISBN:9781595936547
    DOI:10.1145/1242572
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 08 May 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. authentication
    2. measurements
    3. password

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    WWW'07
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    WWW'07: 16th International World Wide Web Conference
    May 8 - 12, 2007
    Alberta, Banff, Canada

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